Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu (是松 豊三郎 Korematsu Toyosaburō?, January 30, 1919 – March 30, 2005) was an American civil rights activist. At the onset of the United States' military involvement in World War II, shortly after the Imperial Japanese Navy launched its attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized that all individuals of Japanese ancestry were to be removed from their homes and forced to live in internment camps, in what is known as the internment of Japanese Americans. When such orders were issued for the West Coast, Korematsu instead became a fugitive.

The legality of the internment order was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States, but Korematsu's conviction was overturned decades later after the disclosure of new evidence challenging the necessity of the internment, evidence which had been withheld from the courts by the U.S. government during the war.

To commemorate his journey as a civil rights activist, the "Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution" was observed for the first time on January 30, 2011, by the state of California, the first such commemoration for an Asian American in the United States. In 2015, Virginia passed legislation to make it the second state to permanently recognize each January 30 as Fred Korematsu Day.

My favorite Supreme Court case. The first time the word "racism" was used in a Supreme Court opinion, and even the majority opinion admitted they were morally in the wrong and only doing it due to the war. Now, sadly, being used by those who want to put Muslims in internment camps as a positive example, when even the Supreme Court in its opinions on the case were saying how horrible it is.